Ahsoka's Akul
by skywalker05
Summary: Ahsoka Tano tells Anakin Skywalker how she got her akul-tooth headdress, and Anakin reveals some painful truths about his own lauded accomplishments. Twoshot; second chapter is a collab with Mathematica.
1. Chapter 1

_A/N: Here's another "skywalker tries to give Ahsoka character depth" story, this time inspired by the following quote from Wookieepedia: _

"_Ahsoka wears an akul-tooth headdress, which could only be worn by Togrutas who had single-handedly killed one of the fierce akul creatures: an impressive feat for one so young."_

* * *

She jumped off the flagship into the cold yellow clouds, her ears filling with the sound of her clothing flapping as she plummeted. The clones' jet packs hissed to life behind her as they followed, and despite the emptiness of the sky ringing in her montrals, she felt _filled up_, embraced by a gravity well as comfortingly choking as a fur coat, and she whooped to fill the sky with the same completeness.

* * *

It may have been the next mission, or a few afterward. They tended to blur together when most of them did not involve things as exciting as jumping out of spacecraft and battling lightsaber-wielding CIS leaders. Most of them involved something like _this_; sitting under a mud-brown-and-grey tarpaulin lashed with rain, waiting while the clones pushed en masse ever so slowly into Seperatist lines. Most of them, too, involved _this_, Master Skywalker coming and looking down at her darkly, saying "Look Snips, I just wanted to talk to you about–"

" My headstrong actions."

"Yeah."

She stammered for a bit, picked her hand off of her knee and set it down. Did not know what to say. Thought, _You're headstrong too, you know._

She said, "Do we have a while? I've got a story to tell you."

Anakin looked out of the makeshift bunker at the gray ground in the distance, at the inhospitable fumes rising from the cracks. Dangerous land for an oxygen breather with bare skin; that's why the clones had gone out alone at first with their plas shells and rebreathers, to thin the ranks. "Sure, Ahsoka." He sat down beside her, all shifting brown cloak and creaking leather.

As she told, she remembered, pictures and Force signatures and echo-maps reprinting lightly in her mind.

* * *

Even civilized Togrutas like the Jedi gathering now in the pillow-strewn meditation chamber wanted the reassurance of a pack sometimes. Others of their species _felt _a certain way, set off a particular little light in their sight and sense of space, and so ten-or-so-year-old Ahsoka felt comfortable there, even more so than she might with her yearmates or Master Plo by her side. Shaak Ti sat beside her with her knees folded underneath her and her long, graceful headtails curving along beside her arms. Beside her, two younglings playfully swatted at each other. The fifth Togruta had initiated the meeting.

He had what Ahsoka did not then know were the hands of a teacher of the art of fighting using pressure points; scarred hands with thick sinews under the rough crimson skin. His headtails were scarred as well, one cratered around the edges as if by blasterfire, but he had a disarming smile, and white patches around his eyes that gave an impression of perpetual bemusement.

He clapped with the rest of them for the Jedi parable Shaak Ti had told, then began his own story.

He told of the death of an akul, and told it so well that Ahsoka could almost see the beast's tufts of orange fur, its undulating legless body, its scaly sides rushing by like a hovertrain. It had been taking livestock from a nearby farm, and instead of shooting it down from the air, the Jedi passing through had offered to challenge it on his own, to undertake the traditional rite of the Togruta. In it, he had said, he had won the headdress that adorned his forehead, similar to but simpler than the one Master Ti wore.

He approached the giant creature reverently, letting it know that he too was a predator. He snuck up on it, through the red-and-blue Shilli grass and the purple and white leafy trees, lightsaber in hand.

When the akul reared up in front of him, he jumped from the trunk of a tree to the beast's head and scoured a rut in its carapace with a swing of his foreign-forest-green lightsaber. He flipped to the ground and watched the thing hiss down at him, its mouth agape to reveal triangular teeth and the reek of meat, while its tail snaked around, rustling the grass in swaths a meter wide, to trap him.

He let it fight him for a time, let it live out its purpose as a writhing, hunting creature, let it teach him where his weaknesses were. Then he killed it as quickly as he could, with a cut across the back of its neck, through the soft fur and the chitin.

He sounded sad when he finished the story, and closed his brown eyes."A good action story, isn't it. But all the tales of the Jedi should teach us isn't that it is good to kill. Sometimes, it is unavoidable. Prowess in combat is necessary sometimes...some opponents, like animals, don't know what to do besides keep fighting. If we have to kill, we do so only with a respect for life."

After a moment of reverent silence and nodding, the master smiled and stood, his story finished. Master Ti gathered the younglings together, but instead of going out into the hall to wait for Master Plo, the young Ahsoka followed the master with the akul-tooth headdress.

"Excuse me, Master."

He looked down at her. "Yes?"

"I just wanted to say I liked your story. You were cool. I...I wish I'd have an akul trophy one day."

A short laugh brightened his face. "Our lives aren't measured by whether what we do is cool, or by our achievements–certainly not by what we've killed." As he spoke he reached behind his head. Ahsoka didn't understand why until the akul teeth went limp around their strand at the base of his headtails. Suddenly the trinket was lose and shining in his hand and he was passing it to her, setting it in the red palm that she had outstretched because of course one did what a master told one to do–

"Jedi don't measure themselves by achievements."

* * *

"But he never told me what they do measure themselves by." Ahsoka looked imploringly up at Anakin. "Then Master Plo came back. And..." She rasied a hand as if to touch the teeth, but set it down again. "I wore it. No one barely noticed, except me. But I...don't deserve it. I want to show that I didn't get it out of pity. Maybe he saw something in me.

"I just want to live up to it.

"So, that's my excuse." She smiled, tried to make it cute, but was sure that she simply ended up looking like she was just staring into the distance (because she was). "What's yours?"


	2. Chapter 2

A/N: This chapter was co-written with the ever-impressive **Mathematica**.

* * *

_"That's my excuse. What's yours?"_

"Well," Anakin said, "what the Master said wasn't entirely true." He fidgeted too for a moment, strong hands curling in and out of fists and making leather gloves creak. "About the Jedi, I mean, about the way that they ..." A LAAT/i droned by overhead. The clones were dying out there, somewhere, but Ahsoka had long since forgotten about them. He started again, bit his lip. (Thought about sand dunes and twin suns and shaking hands caked with sand.) "If Jedi have one great fault, it is measuring themselves by who or what they've killed."

She dimly wondered whether she should mark his use of the third person, or whether that too was just another casualty of war. She counted his pauses, too, how many times he inhaled, breath rasping like a sob.

"On Tatooine—anywhere, probably, people have different ways of fighting. They shout, they debate, they curse. They pretend to give in and get even somehow later. They lie. They just refuse to do whatever their neighbor or brother or parent wants them to do, regardless of what's right." A pause. "They kill."

_("I killed them! I killed them all!"_ And all I could see afterwards were my hands, steady, as I _slaughtered them, like--_)

"Animals aren't like that. They don't scheme, don't plot. They just _fight_, and the one with the sharper claws gets what it wants."

(And all the rest bleed, even though the surrealist thing, the only one I could latch on to with any sort of sanity_ that_ day, was how _clean_ everything would be afterward--)

Ahsoka shivered and looked at the landscape, at the distant soldiers forming white scabs on the bleeding terrain.

"Jedi are warned against revenge and grudges and lies because we're told those things belong to the dark side. Maybe all those things were things sentients evolved to keep ourselves from physically hurting each other, I don't know. Jedi wield weapons because they're taught that other forms of fighting are wrong. Those other forms last longer—resentment, ire, bitterness." A pause. "Anger. Hate."

(And all I could think about then was how everything would be _left_ that day, how time would swallow the bodies and the blood would seep into the sand until there was nothing and --)

"I don't think that justifies killing." A pause. "I don't know what does."

(And all I could think about was how _quiet_ it was, how_ surreal_ the silence was when I --)

She said, "That doesn't answer my question."

"Doesn't it?" He looked right at her, meeting her gaze, icy, like anger. "Ahsoka, I don't need to justify myself to _anyone_." He snarls. "Least of all _you_."

It was her turn to look away, study the floor. Think, _you're avoiding it too_. "I know."

And then there was silence, broken only by the sounds of comm-cries, of grenades and blaster fire and _damn it sir, we're dying out here_ --

"I was nine years old when I left my mother." His voice was a whisper, a shadow of itself. "The last thing she told me was not to look back. So, I didn't. I just went on. Without her. I-- I never said goodbye." Someone fired a shell, and the _screechhisswhizz_ of the rockets framed the words as he spoke, as fitting as a frame to a masterpiece. "And when I reach the temple, I get told about some ancient prophecy, some ideal that I'm supposed to fulfil. That I'm meant to _be_. And I see people I don't know -- people I'm meant to aspire to _be_ -- telling me I'm wrong for _living_ and all I want to do is to _run_, but I --"

(I wondered what blood tasted like, once. It's like the edges of a credit chip -- bitter, metallic. Satisfying.)

She hadn't noticed when he slipped into present tense, and she wondered if she should have.

"I'm always too late, Ahsoka." He bit his lip, and she could see a faint bead of blood form on the wound. "I was too late for the Jedi. Too late for Qui-Gon. Too late for my mother." A pause. "And no matter what I do, it's never enough, and I --"

She noticed the faint sheen of sweat on his forehead as he inhaled, and wondered whether he was quite all right. He wasn't, though, and no matter how much he wanted the clones and Master Obi-Wan and history itself to see him as perfect, the cracks were there, widening --

"-- want more, when I _know_ I shouldn't. Damn it, Ahsoka, if I'd been born one year earlier, if I'd have arrived one hour earlier, if I'd have done something different, played my cards right, I could have --" He breaks off, the hard leather of his gloves firm, unyielding as he clenched his fists. "I'm not some preconceived ideal of theirs, no matter how much they want me to be. I have flaws. I have weaknesses -- but I'm not _meant to_, am I?" A bitter laugh. "I'm meant to be bloody perfect, a model Jedi, infinitely powerful. That's all they want, isn't it? Power."

(I strangled the first one, you know, just so that I could feel the snap as its vertebrae popped under my fingers, so that I could see every vein standing straight on my skin as I squeezed, ripe, ready for the picking --)

"And I _am_ powerful." A pause. "I _will_ be."

The blood on his lip was gone. She swallowed, sweat running down her own forehead now, and wondered when he started speaking to her as an equal, and why it terrified her so much.

"But it's never enough, is it? Nothing I do is enough. Nothing. Nothing."

And now she wondered whether perhaps there was something hidden even from himself that wanted to, for once, be the one who was rescued. The one the camera-eye of the Republic did not swing first to see.

Suddenly, he broke the moment, shattering it like splintered glass. "Did that answer your question?" When she didn't answer, he rose, the soles of his boots making muted _thump-thump_ sounds against the decking in time with her racing pulse, anger scratching a crimson flush on his neck. "Damn it, Ahsoka --"

"Yes." She whispered, the stagnant air filling her throat like fog. "It does."

Then there was silence, his anger deserting him like sand falling from a dune as he fell back against the wall again, both hands slightly shaking. (Everything had been so still that day, afterward, no matter how much blood I wept, how much I heard their screams --)

"Thanks." And later, neither of them would remember which one of them said it, or if either of them said it at all. Later, they would say it was of no consequence.

It wasn't.


End file.
